Excel 2007 Review – 10 things that WOWed me

Hey, better late than never!

It’s very easy to trash Excel 2007, but it definitely has a few good things going for it. Consider it the beta for for Excel 2009 (or whatever it’s called). Hopefully, the major problems will be fixed and other usability tweaks will be incorporated. I don’t expect too many major new features.

Use it exclusively for 4-5 months, and Excel 2003 will seem like an ugly old dinosaur. At least that’s how it went for me.

To paraphrase John’s esteemed opinion, it’s very easy to be distracted by the updated visual appearance of Excel 2007. And I will not deny that Excel 2007 does have some good features going for it. However, the drawbacks far outweigh any of these improvements. I have really tried very hard to like Excel 2007, starting in 2005 in the late alpha testing stages, and I can say that experienced hard-core users will find themselves less productive in Excel 2007, even after they know where their favorite commands have been moved to.
 
The ribbon puts many commands out of sight on the inactive tabs. In all honesty it seems like the new charting machine was never completed. The dialogs which have been redesigned, particularly the chart and shape formatting ones, cannot be used as efficiently as the old dialogs. Moving some options from chart formatting dialogs to charting contextual tabs makes them harder to find and harder to use. If you have any charts with more than a few thousand points, which is not a large total by any means, and Excel bogs down whenever it decides to refresh the charts.
 
I’ve blogged about several aspects of Excel 2007:
A Belated Review of Excel 2007
Changes to Charting in Excel 2007
What happened to my favorite Excel 2003 Chart feature?
Excel 2007 Chart Performance – Revisited
Error Bars in Excel 2007

Wow, Excel ‘07 looks much better than I thought it would. For some reason I had this picture in my head of it being this ugly monstrosity. Now if only my company would upgrade. We just went from 2000 to 2003 about a year ago, so I doubt it’s going to happen soon . . . .

@ Chandoo :
Cud u pls inform the merits and demerits of “OpenOffice.org Calc” w.r.t. excel.

I also liked the charting features of 2007, initially. But, I have to work with others who have earlier versions of Excel. There is a huge problem in compatibility: a chart drawn in 2007 will not display fully in earlier versions: the left or right edges of the chart will be partly cropped, making them unreadable. They have to recreate the chart with their older versions.

There is also a danger that if you install 2007 on top of 2003 or earlier versions, your Windows installation will be corrupted, and you will never be able to access your older Excel version with OLE ever again (I have had to reformat one of my Windows machines to get rid of 2007). My experience has been that Office 2007 is one of the nastiest viruses out there: once you install it, all registry references to other versions of Office are eliminated, and you will not be able to regain full use of your older Office versions, even if you uninstall 2007 and reinstall the older Office version.

I hope you have better luck than I did with the 2007 install, especially if you use OLE. If you can get the 2 versions to co-exist, write about how you did it.

Chandoo, Excel 2007 is a dumb blonde. You saw the blonde, now prepare for the dumb.

Rene -
 
I have heard from many users who have installed multiple versions of Office on their computers with no problems (including one person with Excel 95, 97, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2007). The trick they say is to install in order from the oldest to the newest, in different directories (e.g., C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 97, \Microsoft Office 2000, etc.).
 
Perhaps it’s my own usage patterns, but I have in fact had issues with multiple versions. I suspect some of the problems arise from the shared resources, especially for me the user defined chart gallery. Another source of problems which I think relates to your issue of 2007 settings persisting past uninstallation, is registry settings. I also don’t think you can reliably control which version of Office is summoned for OLE interactions, just as you can’t relaibly control which version is opened when you launch a file from Explorer.
 
Lately I’m seeing some issues with userforms on computers with fresh installs of 2007 and with Excel 2003 freshly updated to SP3. It is a sporadic problem, most people don’t experience it, some who do can be relieved with simple remedies, and some defy all countermeasures. Unfortunately the error message is “Unspecified Error” (no joke!) and searching Google brings up earlier unrelated instances of this error.

“It would have been excellent if MS had provided an option to switch to classic menu navigation.”
Chandoo- They Have…. You just have to turn it ON ….and we should be thankful that they are allowing us to customize the Ribbon to display the Classic UI…

http://i41.tinypic.com/20jk01t.jpg

After reading several reviews of version 2007. I am still waiting to upgrade, my priority is productivity.
Of course there are things in the 2003 that needed improvement, but
I will consider the upgrade when I can customize the UI and when some of the 2003 lost features are added to the new Excel version.

@Gabriela Cerra: I agree. Sometimes I use Excel 2007 on my father’s PC for 4 months and still I can’t get used to it.

The only thing I really appreciate is “3. Status bar now shows average and count as well” mentioned by Chandoo. I really miss this feature in Excel 2003, which I use most of the time. :’-(

I’m not sure, if “most of the dialogs are same”. I find them too big and work with them is less effective.

Even though the conditional formatting is pretty now, it is buggy too. I rely heavily on conditional formatting, and I dislike the globalness of it in 2007. If I just want to remove formatting on a specific area, it is confusing to do so, and sometimes it applies the conditions to cells that I did not intend. The relative references get messy as well (if you want the cells in column B to change color if they match their corresponding cell in column A, and then add then you add data and apply it to more rows, you end up with too many “Applies to” references after a while, hard to clean up).

The tweaks that allow us to emulate the classic menus in the ribbon are not very elegant. In fact, the ribbon is pretty easy to control, once you get over the initial fear of the unknown. It’s way easier to customize using XML than it is to use within the user interface.
 
I would expect MS to be strongly reluctant to roll back to an earlier interface (menus and toolbars), despite their effectiveness and the strong backlash against the ribbon. They went through months of blogging and explaining, justifying how they used incomplete automated user feedback and faulty logic to develop the new system. Apparently we users are too stupid to be trusted with something as flexible and customizable as the toolbars and menus, and we will be happier and more productive with a system that’s much less flexible and almost completely uncustomizable. Um, or at least that’s what we were told.
 
The large new dialogs for the charts (for example) seem to have loads of empty space which could be put to more effective use. To format lines and markers for a chart series in Excel 2003, I need visit only a single tab of a dialog, whereas in Excel 2007, I must visit up to six tabs. If I need something special from one of these tabs, like 3D effect or something equally gaudy, the options appear right on the same tab. The equivalent in 2003 would be shown on a child dialog, and only when the user had called it. But in 2007 they shun child dialogs, except where they make life less efficient: how else to explain the need to pop up a dialog to select data ranges for chart series, custom error bars, etc.? These worked rather nicely on the same tab in 2003.
 
Looks like I’m ranting. Again. But these are the things that have caused me to feel trapped in an inefficient user environment in 2007. The feeling of constraint makes it impossible to enjoy the real improvements that were made.

I don’t expect to roll back the classic UI, only some EASY customization, few lost things like a floating toolbar and not to do 6 clicks instead of one.

Chandoo:

I have suspected (without any real information) that the designers and programmers of the new charting user interface did not actually use this interface in daily battle. I only make small utilities, admitteedly, nothing as massive as part of an Excel-size application, but they are easy to use because I designed them so I could do things more easily.

NO VBA – JUST XML –

1st Hide all built in Tabs except the Addins Tab
2 Create a New Tab called – Menus

On this you can put one rows of menus + 2 Rows of buttons… the ribbon just allows for 3 – another stupid limitation

sam

sir i requested that Please sent me excel formula.
thank you.
your respectfully Ramesh Kumar tripathi .from opk eservices.

Hi there,
I am trying to figure out if there is a way to get other color schemes for Office 2007. I know there are Black, Blue and Silver included in the pack, but there must be a way to edit them. My boss is having difficulty in seeing the difference between active tabs and inactive tabs in the Blue theme, and the Black and Silver are not really much better. Any ideas??
Thanks

When opening an Excel 2007 file in 2003, the colors change, even if I save it in 2003 format, and even if I use the same RGB colors in 2007 as I use in 2003. How can I keep the same colors when opening in different versions?

When opening an Excel 2007 file in 2003, the colors of filled cells change, even if I save it in 2003 format. How can I keep the same colors when opening files in different versions?

Barry -

I think the only reliable way to do this is to use white and black, and maybe primary colors. There is minimal compatibility between color models between Classic and New Excel.

Stephanie -

These are the only schemes available, and I don’t think they can be modified. Microsoft seems not to allow for 40+ year old eyes in their interfaces. There is a Windows option for enhanced contrast, I think buried in the display settings, but it makes everything else stark and ugly.

I don’t mind the 2007 ribbon except for two reasons:
- I have certain tools I use and when I consistantly use a function, I want it available on a customizable bar.
- Tools I never or rarely use, I take off the bar.
It’s that simple. I’ve gone back to Excel 2003 and have started using Open Office as well. The future for Excel, on the current path is dismal for the experienced user, IMO.

I hated the new ribbon when I first saw it on beta versions in 2006, after using 2007 for the last 2 1/2 years It grows on me, while some options I cant find, overall I find it faster to use.

The new tables and improved pivot tables have saved me hours of work!

Perhaps microsoft has spent some of the time on office 2010 in speeding it up!

And if you would like my 2cents on a feature for the next version!

The ability to define a repeated part of a formula IE

=if(sum(range)>0,sum(range),0 (simple example but sometimes the parts can be big)

it would be nice to do

=define(Form1,”sum(range)”) IF(form1,Form1,0)

or similar to cut down on repetition!

I totally agree with Jon Peltier. I love Excel 2003 and hate 2007. All my work has been affected by installing 2007. Most good reviews regarding excel 2007 are about its looks but productivity has been definetly affected. I regret upgrading from 2003.

User interface is just one of productivity to consider. What about after the weeks you took to re-learn the new look-and-feel?

Microsoft Excel 2007 is a major rewrite so it is justified to wait a lot from it.

It really brings great benefits, to name just a few:

1. Forget inserting a column/row to exclude adjacent data in Autofilter with new Excel Table
2. Filter discrete items. Use check boxes to select or deselect items
3. Don’t guess anymore when picking arguments (blocked cells or unknown cells because a blocked column header due to a flooding formula bar). Formula bar content is automatically wrapped
4. Delete multiple names at once
5. Dual-processors and multithreaded chipsets to perform faster calculations in large, formula-intensive spreadsheets
6. Focus on data analysis as you add data. Excel Table AutoExpansion
7. Delete duplicates intuitively and by field
8. Better charting and Pivot Table experience
9. And more…

Read this article about what makes Excel 2007 better than Excel 2003: http://www.excel-spreadsheet-authors.com/excel-2007.html

John -

Your points 1 and 6 re Tables in 2007 were true of Lists in 2003. Lists already had much of the capabilities of Tables, but they were a well kept secret. Lists were the killer feature which got me to upgrade from 2000 to 2003.

Half of your point 8 is false. The charting experience has been mostly much less pleasant. The default formatting is less ugly (note I didn’t say “not ugly”), and the process of formatting a chart has become tedious and obscure.

The items you mention which are new have not been sufficient to entice me to upgrade for my own work. I will have to admit that 2007 has given me a lot of conversion work, but much of this work has been unpleasant, both for me and for the clients who had to relearn how to use Excel.

One more point for Excel 2007 worth mention is the no. of rows;
from 65536 to 1048576. Phew! That’s great!

“One more point for Excel 2007 worth mention is the no. of rows;
from 65536 to 1048576. Phew! That’s great!”

Hah, wow.. how did it take soo long for this comment to appear, IMO this IS the reason to get Excel 2007.

I have been using 2007 for a couple months now and I am absolutey disgusted by it. Clearly Microsoft wanted to create a program that was beautiful for novice users, however, as someone who knew Excel inside out I find the new appearance and layout to be very inefficient. The way we describe it around our office is 2003 was the girl you wanted to marry, 2007 is a one night stand.

“2003 was the girl you wanted to marry, 2007 is a one night stand”

I think 2007 is what Rodney Dangerfield had in mind when he coined the phrase “two-bagger”.

I am a power user of Excel and have been trying for a year to make XL2007 work as effectively as 2003. Definitely the million rows, the PDF add-on, and expanded chart types help. But the problems for serious users like me are major.
- I get frequent warnings that “data may have been lost or corrrupted.”
- Almost every workbook has “minor loss of fidelity.”
- Date records in columns that are used as chart X axes get replaced with a weird string.
- Many keyboard shortcuts like Alt E A (Edit Select All) do not work or involve an extra step. Worse, here Excel pretends to recognize what you want but does not do it.
- Some VBA macros would not work until I declared all variable types.
- XL’07 reports “invalid names” were changed to “#REF!” but then I could not find any such.
- Prompt for passwords suddenly stops appearing; workbook just opens.
- PDF writer within Excel (via MS Add-In) worked fine at first then started to produce mostly gibberish; now useless.
- As some mentioned above, the tooolbars are much less flexible and useful than before (I am surprised the backlash has not been more severe on this); that is a major step backward.
- One critical workboook suddely started to take five times longer to save. Can’t tell why.
- Print Preview button stopped working altogether.
I have nothing agains change. But this has been a real productivity killer. Takes an hour sometimes to do what used to take minutes. Again, I am surprised more people are not up in arms at the changes.

Fear not Berferd
A lot of the issues you discussed have been addressed in 2010
But I still agree with your opening line that 2007 and even 2010 is not as effective as 2003

My old Laptop and I have been using another office laptop with XL 2007. What a disaster this software is – sure there is a learning curve with new things – but as many observe even after you figure out by trial and error where the functions are hidden, it takes more clicks to get to the function you need than the old version – How about a classic toobar option – why should everyone’s productivity crash so that Microsoft can roll out software that benefits only themselves with new sales and a comparatively small number of users.

As a long time user of Excel (since version 2) I first tried 2007 as a CTP version at first I thought the ribbon was designed for new users and was an annoyance. After daily use of it for the last 3+years I wouldnt go back (I had to use Excel2002 recently for 6 months).

2010 which I am using on my laptop now has resolved some of the niggles I had, now I can edit the ribbon quickly and create tabs which suit me! The only complaint I have about excel is the fact that Visual Basic is not improving, it would be nice to work in VBA in a more visual studio like environment (yes i know about VSTO)!